Before the Parade Passes by, LaBonge Gets L.A. in Line

Budget woes threatened to end a long-standing Los Angeles tradition. But a few civic boosters, including City Councilman Tom LaBonge, stepped in to raise the money to make sure the city has a float in the Pasadena Rose Parade.

LaBonge, a local history buff, sounded the warning in a Dec. 2 plea to business and civic leaders.

“It may surprise you that Los Angeles, which has sponsored a float in the parade for all 110 years of its existence, is in jeopardy of not having a float in the 2005 Rose Parade,” LaBonge wrote.

“Demands on the city budget have increased faster than the revenue to meet them, leaving no option but to seek funding from private sources.”

Also, faced with backlash over using tax dollars to pay for floats, city officials handed off the $120,000 bill this year to LA Inc., the convention and visitors bureau, at the same time they cut its allocation from the hotel bed tax in half.

The private nonprofit bureau has to come up with the money for the float, imaginatively titled “Enjoying the Environment.” Christopher C. Heywood, an LA Inc. manager, said it would come from the bureau’s corporate members, not from its share of the hotel bed tax.

“L.A.’s representation in the Rose Parade is a tradition that speaks volumes about what makes L.A. a desirable visitor destination, especially when most of the country is locked in winter,” Heywood said.

LaBonge’s fundraising has brought in $8,000, including $2,500 from the city’s police union and $1,000 from philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad.

“I think it’s extremely important that Los Angeles is continually represented in the greatest parade on the first of January anywhere in the world,” LaBonge said.

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Baca Says He’ll Stay in His Comfort Zone

With President Bush hunting for a new head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, one lawman mentioned as a possible candidate is putting a damper on the speculation.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca says he appreciates that people put his name forward, but he seemed to be saying in an interview with The Times that he is happy where he is.

“I don’t think anyone in their right mind would want this job,” Baca said. “You’re talking about 50 states, 50 forms of planning, and you have 3,000 sheriff’s departments and maybe 5,000 police departments, and we don’t have a national police system.”

And don’t get him started on the salary.

“I know what it takes. I know what I would do in a job like that, but it would virtually be a seven-day-a-week job, 12 hours a day just to organize everything under one system. That’s asking a lot of an individual at $150,000,” Baca said. “You’ve got the nation’s security in your hands, and they’re going to pay you $150,000 ... and when the president’s term is over, they don’t even have a party for you when they kick you out the door.”

Baca, who was first elected in 1998, makes more than $207,000.

Prodded for a few more reasons, he added, “Why would I even want to think about going to Washington, where the weather is terrible. I would be way out of my comfort zone. I don’t even know what the federal bureaucracies are like.”

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A ‘Girlie Man’ Has One Uncounted Vote

Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove), who was stationed at Guantanamo, Cuba, when he was elected to the California Assembly last month, showed supporters who greeted his return that he had kept his sense of humor.

The lawmaker, whose Army job is prosecuting suspected terrorists, monitored election computer returns on his computer until 3 a.m., when it became clear that he would be heading back to Sacramento 10 years after his first stint in the Assembly.

To celebrate, he donned a T-shirt that read, “Once a Girlie Man, Always a Girlie Man” (a reference to a remark about Sacramento Democrats made by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger) and headed back to his barracks. On the way, he ran across a guard, who quizzed him about his nonregulation uniform.

Umberg told him he’d just been elected to the California Assembly from Orange County.

“I just voted for you,” replied the stunned guard.

The small world phenomenon was, alas, just a bit of wishful thinking. The guard hails from Mission Viejo, which is several miles south of Umberg’s district.

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Yaroslavsky Monitors Election in Ukraine

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky took a break last week from the strain of supervising to travel to an exotic land.

But it was no vacation.

Yaroslavsky journeyed to Ukraine as an international monitor of Sunday’s presidential election to make sure the balloting was not compromised by the kind of election fraud, violence and intimidation that caused that country’s Supreme Court to throw out the results of the November election.

“The primary reason the Ukrainian Supreme Court invalidated the last election was because of information from election monitoring teams like ours,” Yaroslavsky said last week before he left for Kiev.

Yaroslavsky was part of an international group of 30 observers who were to make sure the election was fair.

His trip was sponsored by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, based in Washington, D.C.

Yaroslavsky was also an election observer in 1990 for the first free election in Romania after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu.

Despite allegations of violence in the last election, Yaroslavsky said he was not worried.

“It was a rugged election in November,” he said. “But there is something very rewarding about watching a country that has been under the thumb of a totalitarian regime for so long emerge into the sunshine of a truly democratic and free election.”

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Points Taken

* The 80-plus neighborhood councils in Los Angeles plan to take an active role in the mayor’s race. The Citywide Alliance of Neighborhood Councils is co-sponsoring two debates, Feb. 7 and Feb. 28, at CBS Television City in the Fairfax district. The first, to be broadcast by KCAL-TV Channel 9, will focus on “L.A. Today”; the second, to be broadcast by KCBS-TV Channel 2, will focus on “L.A. Tomorrow.”

* Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn will run uncontested for reelection. The city clerk’s office found that a potential challenger, John Fer, did not turn in enough valid signatures to qualify for the March 8 ballot. Janice Hahn joins Councilmen Alex Padilla and Eric Garcetti and City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo as incumbents who have no opponents in the election.

* The Global Consulting Group announced last week it had acquired Rose & Kindel, a California-based public affairs consulting firm. Maureen Kindel, former president of the Los Angeles Public Works Board, will continue to handle clients in Los Angeles, and Cristina Rose, who was the chief lobbyist for the California Department of Consumer Affairs under Govs. Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown, will handle clients in Sacramento.

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You Can Quote Me

“I view it as the ‘dirty plate’ syndrome. You let your kid get away with not putting away one dirty plate and the next thing you know, the kitchen’s a mess.”

Orange County Supervisor Chris Norby’s twist on the “broken window” theory of how to combat urban decay, which he offered while discussing the need for swift graffiti removal.

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Contributing this week were Times staff writers Jack Leonard and Jean O. Pasco.